Eugene Jolas

John George Eugene Jolas, Eugene Jolas also, ( born October 26, 1894 in Union City, New Jersey, † May 26, 1952 in Paris) was an American journalist and poet. In Paris, he was from 1927 to 1938 the literary magazine transition out.

Life and work

Eugene Jolas was born the son of a French father, Eugene Jolas Pierre, and a German mother, Christine, born Ambach, who had emigrated in 1897 in the United States. When he was two years old, his parents returned to Europe, and he grew up in Forbach (Moselle), according to 1871 Alsace - Lorraine, Lorraine today on. At 15, he traveled to New York, where in the Bronx, he perfected his English skills at the DeWitt Clinton Evening High School and earned as a messenger a modest livelihood. His first poems he wrote in German expressionist style. He worked as a journalist at the People's Journal, the freedom friend and The Pittsburg Sun in Pennsylvania.

During World War II, Jolas joined in 1917 at the U.S. Army, he was stationed at Camp Lee, Virginia, where he brought out small newspapers for soldiers and veterans. After discharge from the army Jolas commuted for several years between North America and Europe to continue his career in journalism. After living in Paris in the years 1923 and 1924 he got a job at the newspaper The Chicago Tribune Paris Edition, for which he was traveling as a local reporter and many artists and writers met. His column was called Rambles through Literary Paris.

In 1924, Eugene Jolas ' first book of poems appeared in Rhythm Ink Press in New York, the second, Cinema, at Adelphi Press, followed there in 1926; more volumes of poetry appeared in the 1930s. In January 1926 he returned to New York and married Mary MacDonald ( 1893-1987 ), whom he had met in Paris. After marriage the couple lived in New Orleans, where Jolas worked for The Item Tribune.

1927 Jolas and his wife went back to Paris and founded in April together with Elliot Paul the avant-garde literary magazine transition. He met James Joyce and was a strong supporter Joyce's Work in Progress, a, later Finnegans Wake, a work that Jolas regarded as the perfect complement to his own Manifesto, which he published in transition in 1927. The manifesto says, among other things, that "the revolution in the English language is an accomplished fact " and "the time is a tyranny that had to be abolished " and " the writer expressions, that he is not communicating ." We need new words, new abstractions, new hieroglyphics, new symbols, new myths.

In February 1935 responded former friends in transition to Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Under the title The Testimony against Gertrude Stein Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, André Salmon, Tristan Tzara, and the couple Jolas accused them of false representation.

In the 1930s, began Jolas ' work as a translator. He took a break from his publishing activity in Paris and worked in New York for the Havas News Agency, where he was American "news" into French. In the literary field, he created the English version of Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz and occupied himself with works by André Breton, Gérard de Nerval and Carl Sternheim. In 1937 he returned to Paris, took further translations and published anthologies. 1938 Jolas was the co-founder of the new literary monthly magazine volontes. Other founders belonged example, Raymond Queneau. Volontes was set at the outbreak of World War II, transition in spring 1938. 1939 Jolas moved back to New York and became a freelance writer. After the German occupation of France in 1940 he brought his family back to America.

According to intelligence operations for the Office of War Information in New York, he went in 1944 to London to translate messages. In January 1945, he helped in Germany, build a free, unsupported by an ideology, press. He worked at a newspaper Aachen and Heidelberg and was then the "Editor -in- Chief" at the German News Agency ( DANA, later DENA ). In February 1947 he returned to Paris with his family and working on his autobiography Man From Babylon, which he had begun in 1939. In 1948 he became editor of the Neue Zeitung in Munich, he gave this post on in April 1950 and returned to Paris to again be a freelance writer. Eugene Jolas died on 26 May in 1952 a long illness. The guided as Eugene and Maria Jolas Papers estate belongs to the inventory of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

His daughter Betsy Jolas, born in 1926, is a composer.

Jolas often used as a pseudonym the name Theo Rutra.

More information

• Has photos of Adolph Johannes Fischer, the James Joyce for transition, No. 16 /17, 1929 contributed, : Fluviana.

Works (selection)

• Cinema: Poems. Introduction: Sherwood Anderson. Adelphi, New York 1926
• Eugene Jolas (ed.): Anthology de la nouvelle poésie américaine. Kra, Paris 1928.
• Eugene Jolas (ed. ): Le Nègre qui chante. Editions des Cahiers libres, Paris 1928
• Secession in Astropolis. Black Sun Press, Paris, 1929.
• Samuel Beckett, Eugene Jolas, Robert McAlmon, William Carlos Williams, among others: in: Our Exmination round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress ( 1929). Essays on James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.
• Hypnolog of scolding eye. Vertigral Editions, Paris 1932
• The Language of Night. The Servire Press, The Hague 1932
• Motsdéluge, hypnologues. Editions des Cahiers libre, Paris 1933
• I Have Seen Monsters and Angels. Transition Press, Paris 1938
• Planets and Angels. Cornell College chapbooks, Mount Vernon, Iowa 1940.
• Words from the Deluge. Available at Gotham Book Mart, New York, 1941.
• Wanderpoem: Angelic Mythamorphosis of the City of London. Transition Press, Paris, 1946.
• Chemins du monde: I. Fin de l' ère coloniale? II Peuples et évolution. Editions de Clermont, Paris 1948.

• Andreas Kramer, Rainer Rumold (ed.), Eugene Jolas: Man from Babel. Yale University Press, New Haven 1998. Autobiography.
• Klaus H. Kiefer, Rainer Rumold (ed.): Eugene Jolas: Critical Writings, 1924-1951. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill., 2009.